As the world's leading laboratory trade fair, analytica 2024 provides a comprehensive market overview and information on the latest developments in laboratory technology, analytics and biotechnology. Fraunhofer IMM will be showcasing selected developments from our Diagnostics business unit.

Visit us at the Fraunhofer joint booth in hall A3, booth 407. Make an appointment and get in touch with our applied research experts.

Our exhibits

Liquid biopsy - diagnostics for personalized medicine

The course of a cancerous disease is difficult to predict and, thus, the prognosis for the patient often is uncertain. Although it is known that each patient responds differently to one and the same therapy in clinical practice diagnostic and therapeutic options are still not sufficient to allow for a treatment taking into account the patient’s individual tumor characteristics. For a more efficient investigation of individual courses of disease we have developed a fully automated system for the “liquid biopsy” in order to isolate single tumor cells (CTCs) from patient blood. The system is designed to enable cancer researchers to obtain CTCs from individual patients and, on the basis of them, to study tumor characteristics and develop therapeutic approaches. This would be a further step towards the so-called personalized healthcare by means of which a therapy could be tailored to each single patient with so far unmet precision.

Keywords for talking to our experts on site:

  • automated rapid test systems,
  • microfluidics-based diagnostics
  • Point-of-care testing
  • automation of diagnostics
  • Lab-on-chip systems
  • personalized diagnostics

 

InBaDtec – On-site biological contamination detection in industrial fluid

InBaDtec aims to fulfill such technology gaps in order to realize automated preparation of water samples in prior to the use of qPCR analysis. It allows the direct on-site detection of pathogens from large amounts of water sample (one liter or more) in as fast as one hour. The integrated steps are mainly sample pre-cleaning, microorganism concentration, lysis, mixing, and PCR. An extra optional step to distinguish between live and dead pathogens can also be integrated to avoid false positive results from dead microorganisms. The InBaDtec project targets two initial applications, one is analyzing the Legionella in wastewater, and the other one is analyzing the Hormoconis resinae in kerosene. The processes are all done automatically, thus enabling point-of-use detection. The "InBaDtec" system itself can be completely cleaned and reused.

The Fraunhofer IMM device basically contains:

  • a cleaning module to first remove excess dirt
  • a two-step concentration module to reduce the water sample volume from liter to micro-liter level that can be used for PCR, while maximizing bacteria concentration efficiency
  • a lysis unit to break apart the microorganisms allowing the release of its genetic material which is then mixed with pre-loaded lyophilized PCR reagents
  • a miniaturized ultra-fast PCR module previously developed at IMM